


Gone

by AshVee



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Emotionally Hurt Stiles Stilinski, Everyone's bad at feelings, Gen, Hunters, Hurt/Comfort, Pairing if you Squint, Physically Hurt Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-16 02:34:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10561952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: When the pack bond disappears, Stiles finds himself running into trouble.





	

**Author's Note:**

> AN: I don't know if I like this...like at all. Let me know your feelings.

Stiles braced on hands and knees, the cool chill of concrete numbing his fingers. Blood pooled below him, dripping off the laceration along his hairline. It trickled down his temple, the angle of his jaw. His lip was fat and split wide, blood dribbling with spit off of his chin. His left eye was swollen shut, the brow lacerated and dripping into his lashes. 

The sound of an industrial fan was drowned out by the rushing in his ears. Even that nearly drowns out the soft spoken hunter’s question.

“You ready to tell us who your alpha is?” The man had none of the traditional look of a hunter. He was slight, with a soft face, unmarred by the world or the weight of his sins. He wore light blue jeans and a soft emerald green t-shirt that looked like it came from a WalMart bargain bin — Stiles was good at spotting his own wardrobe.

“Fuck you,” Stiles said, spitting out a clot of blood lodged in the back of his throat. It hit the cement with a splat, sending the pooled blood spattering. The bo staff the man carried came around, hitting him hard on the right ear. The force sent him sideways, and he let himself go to lessen the blow. His ear rang, and he pawed at it clumsily. Fingers came back stained red. 

The man was in front of him, lips moving, but Stiles couldn’t hear the words over the ringing in his ears. “Can you hear me? Or did I rupture your eardrum?” 

“I can hear you, jackass,” Stiles muttered. “I’m never going to-”

“Save yourself some pain, kid.” A woman called from across the warehouse. She was exactly what he’d come to expect from female hunters: beautiful, aware of it, and trying to use it to get what she wanted. She hadn’t lifted so much as a hand to Stiles since he’d walked into this cluster fuck of a trap. Occasionally, she’d crouched down beside him, asked him if it was worth it, and caressed his latest hurt. He wasn’t dumb enough to not recognize the play. 

“I’m a masochist,” he said. 

“How do you know you’re not protecting someone who’s already dead?” the male hunter asked, crouching down beside him. The man’s soft brown eyes stared at him openly, as if he had nothing in the world he’d like more than to stop what he was doing. 

“Because you’re still here,” Stiles said, wheezing past a cramp in his ribcage. There was nothing broken there yet, but the bruising would be spectacular if he lived to see it. “Because if they’re dead there’s no reason for this.” 

“But they’re not there anymore, right?” the female asked, coming close to crouch down beside him, the toes of her boots in his blood. “We were able to grab you because they cut ties, kid. You get that? You get they just cut you out. If they hadn’t, they’d be here and you wouldn’t be bleeding into the concrete.”

And wasn’t that just exactly and completely correct? Wasn’t that eating at the back of his brainstem every minute? 

Because he’d woken up in his bed, so very alone, the kind of alone he hadn’t been in years, before the pack bonds had solidified and kept them close. The initial fear was that he was the only one left alive, that something had hit them so hard and so sudden the shock wave hadn’t even given him time to feel their pain. His phone had rung, a text message demanding his presence if he wanted them to live through the night, and he’d gone. 

Idiotic and short sighted and ill prepared, he’d gone. And every moment since, he’d been alone because they didn’t have his pack. 

“Still wouldn’t tell you shit,” he said, chuckling as the woman’s face soured. “You’re not very good hunters, you know that?” he asked. 

The man’s fist slammed into the side of his head, and he laughed through the pain because this? This didn’t hold a candle to feeling like his family had abandoned him. 

“What? You couldn’t figure it out? You shadow the town and find evidence of a wolf pack and see a human hanging on the outskirts and figure: well, he’ll tell us everything we need to know? You actually thought that would work? And what? Allison was an Argent so she’s off limits - or were you too afraid of what Chris might do if he found out you beat his daughter in a warehouse?” 

“Something like that,” she admitted with a smile. “See, I don’t have the most time to spend here, and I really want to go out with a bang. Finishing what Kate Argent couldn’t? What Gerard Argent couldn’t? My name will go down in history.” 

“Your name’s going to go down in history as the crazy bitch that beat the Sheriff's kid half to death in a warehouse. The hunter world’s going to love you for that.” 

“It’s going to remember me for that,” she said, standing and returning to her perch against a crate. Stiles blew out a breath of air and let his arms and legs sag to the concrete. He was going to die in this warehouse. He wasn’t going to talk, and they weren’t going to let him leave.

“Get up, kid.”

“Fuck you,” Stiles said. He lay there a moment as the man considered his next move. He brought the staff up, consideringly, threateningly, and when Stiles didn’t so much as flinch, he brought it back down to the concrete with a huff. 

“You’re going to get up,” the hunter said, bending forward to grab Stiles by the arm. He went with weight in his limbs, a sag to his spine. It wasn’t so much fabricated as it was exaggerated. It was...odd being cut off from the pack so suddenly. While he wasn’t a wolf, wasn’t the ridiculously strong, fast healing, shifting creature of the night, he was more pain resistant, more quick to heal, and he’d taken worse beatings than this without so much hurt before. 

In the absence of that strength, he felt like a newborn kitten. The part of him that had researched psychological diseases during the nogitsune wondered if it was the physical stressor or the psychological that left him feeling like so much shit. 

He had his answer twenty minutes later, as the man laid into him with the staff again. As far as hunters and torture went, they were particularly mild, painfully routine. It was an enraged howl that drew his attention, long and lingering and full of promise. He could place it in an instant - Derek, and then Scott, Isaac, Erica, Boyd all rising quickly after.

Stiles’s head snapped up from where he’d been bent over a crate. He smiled despite the shattered cheekbone and the split to his lip, the missing right molar. The hurts were still real, still damning, but a blanket lifted off of his limbs.

“Little pig, little pig, let me in,” he whispered, forcing himself upright. 

“There’s enough mountain ash out there to keep out all the packs in North America,” the woman said, though she crossed to a window and looked out into the darkness. Stiles considered a moment and figured she was probably right or the pack would be inside already. 

Even with their mountain ash, they were worried, and the man turned away from him. Stiles blinked at his back a moment, confused at his utter incompetence. That was as long as it took, and he slipped forward, pain be damned, gripping the gun at the man’s hip and shoving him forward. He stumbled but spun, bringing the bo staff around at head height. Somewhere, Stiles recognized the piercing scream of impending death, echoing and more distant than the howls but approaching quickly.

Stiles took the blow off of his shoulder, turning with it and bringing the gun up. The woman fell in a quick thunder of gunfire. Stiles hadn’t enjoyed learning to shoot, but he’d done it. He’d done it well. She would not be getting back up. The man backed up, bo staff in front of him as if it could deflect a bullet. It couldn’t. 

It didn’t. 

“Mother fucker,” Stiles muttered, dropping the gun and sagging back against the crate. His ribs throbbed with every breath - broken now. HIs cheekbone, his ribs, maybe his left wrist, all broken. His ankle ached but held his weight as he stood. The pack was panicking; Stiles could hear it, if he couldn’t feel it. The lack of them there was disturbing, but not so much as when they hadn’t been there, when they hadn’t come. 

He took a staggered step forward, but his ankle - broken, definitely broken - gave way with a sickening crunch and razor sharp pain and tearing. He ended up on his back, a scream torn from his throat into the fluorescent warehouse lighting. The bone was a dull white stained pink from blood, the shine low in the haze. 

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. Adrenaline seeped from his veins, making him weak and lethargic and blurring his vision. A car door slammed outside, voices rose and fell, the words muffled by the rush of blood in his ears.

At some point, the wolves had to have gotten into the warehouse, because when he opened his eyes after a blink he was staring up at the clean, clinical white fluorescent lights of a hospital room. 

“You are an idiot.” Lydia’s voice was high and crisp, the way it got when she was angry at herself more than anyone else but didn’t want to admit it. 

“Fer what now?” he asked, lifting his head enough to see her sitting at the foot of his bed, legs crossed as she inspected her fingernails. Her eyes cut up to him, the look speaking more than anything else. 

“I am not an idiot.” 

“Didn’t say you were.” It hurt to hold his head up for long, so he dropped it to look back at the ceiling. 

“You are better at stalling than that,” she said, and it took him a moment to realize what she meant. “You’re better than that unless you weren’t trying.” 

“I killed them.” 

“You did,” she agreed. “After they broke three of your ribs, your left distal fibula, right zygomatic arch, the sphenoid sinus on that side, the left ulna, the right first, second, and third proximal phalanges—” 

“I’m very impressed with your medical jargon, Lyds,” Stiles said, cutting her off. 

“I wasn’t done,” she said. “The point being that I’ve seen you walk away with less after ten minutes against an alpha, Stiles. You did this on purpose? For what? To convince Derek that—” 

“Woah!” Stiles shouted, hands up despite the scream in his wrist and his shoulder from the jarring movement. “What are you talking about?” 

“Your argument with Derek and Scott,” Lydia was speaking slowly, brows drawn together like she was concerned he had a head injury — okay, a worse head injury. “The argument that ended with the pair of them declaring themselves separate entities yet again even though we all know it’s bullshit.” 

“I didn’t track down hunters to beat the shit out of me because Derek and Scott shouted at each other,” Stiles said, baffled. “Why would I do that? Why would anyone do that?” 

“You broke the bond, Stiles,” Lydia said firmly but hushed. Her face was creased, the little lines around her eyes that meant something had hurt her. “You were just...gone, and everyone thought you’d offed yourself or something. John wasn’t pleased to be woken up in the middle of the night to the pack breaking down his front door. You were gone, and then you were gone. It took us hours to track you down. Do you know—” 

“You were gone,” Stiles said, cutting her off. “You were all just gone, and I woke up to this stupid ass text message and—“

“Oh,” Lydia said, the grief and concern washed away from her face. “Oh, thank god.” Lydia moved quickly for a human when she wanted to, and in a moment, she was tucked beneath his chin, pressing too hard against his broken ribs. 

“Lyds—” Stiles muttered, tapping her lightly as he tensed, trying to splint against the pain. 

“Sorry.” She sprang away from him, to her feet, and back several steps. “But this is...this is the best case scenario.” 

“I got the shit kicked out of me by hunters. In what world is this the best case scenario?” 

“In the one where she was convinced you’d picked a fight to get yourself killed - or - to get our attention.” Derek’s voice was tired, worn thin in ways that usually only happened when he was injured. He leaned just inside the door frame, sharp eyes rolling over Stiles and Lydia in that way he had since he’d become the alpha — had kept doing even after that power was gone.

“I wouldn’t pick a fight to—”

“I know,” Derek said, hands up in the universal ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ gesture. “But she’s right. You’re better at stalling.” 

Stiles couldn’t argue the point. He was better at stalling. He could have played up the poor human bit, begged a little, cried and fed them some bullshit to put them on a snipe hunt. He didn’t, because stalling only worked when someone was coming to find you. The pack bonds had been gone, the things that Stiles could feel like pleasant weights in his chest had been suddenly gone. 

They throbbed pleasantly in his chest, the dull ache of a new bond — a bond remade — a pleasant pain. Stiles took a moment to feel the pain there, a better pain than the rest, but in his silence Derek’s flared, red and angry and pained. Stiles’ head snapped up to look at the former alpha as he stood in the doorway. 

He looked destroyed in that moment, eyes wide and jaw loose like he’d just figured something—

“Well, we’re going to have to work on your self preservation skills,” Lydia said, carefully not looking at him or Derek. She made a little noise in the back of her throat. “I have a personal statement to be writing. You can’t keep me at your bedside all day.” 

Derek let her by with a little, half dazed side step. Stiles didn’t anticipate Derek Hale of all people to get why he hadn’t bothered, but the wrecked look on his face was enough. 

“We would never—”

“I know that, Sourwolf,” Stiles said, cutting him off. 

“Apparently you don’t.” 

“I know it; that doesn’t mean it’s not what you think when someone’s whispering in your ear and beating the shit out of you in the middle of the night and your pack isn’t there and they aren’t coming and you’ve got sarcasm and pride and apparently unreturned loyalty as your only defence.” 

And god, when had it gotten so difficult to breath? When had his throat tightened like that? His chest ache? 

“Easy.” There was warmth against his back, making him lean forward despite the screaming in his ribs and shoulder and — the pain was good. It was sharp and real and it made him forget he couldn’t breath. He embraced it, straining a little further forward than the hand at his back was making him. Pain was clarity. Pain was breath and life and everything in between. 

“Easy.” The pain ebbed away, running down a drain like so much water, and the panic slowly seeped back into his chest. “Breath.” 

He did. He tried, but it ran away from him when the pain disappeared too much. A pair of shuttering breaths later, and there was the vague throbb at his ankle to set him to rights. Stiles wasn’t aware of anything but that razor edge between panic and pain for several long minutes. 

When he came back to himself, when he could breath without every muscle screaming and where he could relax without his chest constricting, Derek was pressed against his side on the narrow hospital bed, hand bracing him upright, forearm streaked in black. 

“It’s alright,” Stiles muttered, and that streaking disappeared. 

Stiles had never hated silence so much in his life. 

“When I felt my...when...when Kate killed them and I felt them all disappear, I didn’t want to try either.” It was almost painful hearing those words, but Stiles couldn’t so much as open his mouth to stop him. Derek didn’t seem to want to speak any more, and they sat there in silence. 

With the sun setting behind the hospital, the overhead lights kicked off to let him rest, the room fell into a hazy dark. 

“Don’t disappear,” Stiles said quietly.

“I won’t if you won’t.”


End file.
